Nelson: Canada's more than a country of convenience

Vancouver police officers keep pro-China supporters away from pro-Hong Kong supporters during a demonstration for both pro and against extradition law changes in Hong Kong rallied at the Broadway-City Hall SkyTrain Station in Vancouver, Canada on August 17, 2019. DON MACKINNON / AFP/Getty Images

By the time anyone reads this, I’ll be nervously checking the first day’s play at Headingley, as England’s cricketers attempt to level the Ashes series with those darned Aussies.

What I won’t be doing is making up some cardboard sign to carry whilst parading back and forth in front of the British consulate in Calgary, protesting the looming Brexit decision. That’s because it isn’t any of my business.

Whatever my former countrymen and women finally decide as to their future collective relationship with Europe is not my concern and while I indeed have certain views about it, the right or inclination to make them a matter of public spectacle was, in my opinion, freely given up 37 years ago when I left the U.K. and came to Canada.

It was a choice I made and, more importantly, a choice this country made in accepting me as a future citizen. I’ll be grateful until the day I die. So while I’ll always retain a love of cricket along with a strange fondness for warm beer, I know, without any shadow of doubt, where I stand and to which anthem I sing. This here is my country, this here is my province and this here is my city.

But increasingly some immigrants appear not to share such conviction; instead, Canada serves simply as a country of convenience, offering better health care or higher-paying jobs or simply a place where the cops can’t kick down your front door at 2 a.m. because they don’t care for your particular brand of religion.

Of course, Canada is all of those things, but it is something much more.

True, it is a country that respects so many cultures and celebrates the countless heritages of its citizens. Heck, we even get a day off each August to mark such differences.

Celebrating the love of a certain food, dance, dress or music from the land where you or your parents were born is fine. Indeed, we all benefit from this smorgasbord of cultural influences.

But ancient hatreds from far away lands cannot and should not be welcomed or encouraged here. They should be left at those various global departure lounges.

Yet the current Liberal government revels in such pandering, with an endless cacophony about the joys of multiculturalism. Now, this is far different from appreciating Ukrainian dancing or daring to sample a vindaloo curry (or having the good taste to enjoy cricket.)

Because multiculturalism implies there’s really no Canadian culture at all, so feel free to fill your boots, so to speak, and import the very one you supposedly left behind. And with that come the old scars, hatreds and enmities.

This past weekend we had two demonstrations arising from such far away troubles. On Saturday cops were needed to separate opposing groups arguing about the current happenings in Hong Kong. Then, the next day, a hundred or so folk were out protesting the Indian government’s decision to strip Kashmir of autonomous rule.

In June 1985, the worst mass murder in Canadian history occurred when a bomb went off aboard an Air India flight from Montreal to London killing 329 people, 268 of them Canadian citizens. That outrage came courtesy of Vancouver-area Sikhs, fighting for a Khalistan homeland. Obviously, beautiful British Columbia wouldn’t suffice, though they were happy enough to arrive there a few years earlier.

We don’t need to import the world’s problems. And we should not encourage any citizen or immigrant to believe this is a country not expecting allegiance, that folk can take the bits they like but cling to the debris from which they once willingly left behind.

Support your old soccer team, stick a shamrock somewhere on St. Patrick’s Day, heck, play the bagpipes if you must. Be proud of your heritage. But this is Canada and you owe it, and it alone, your true allegiance.

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